THE CASSOWARY, A STORY BY TULSE LUPER
A jet aircraft on a cloudless night began its landing flight-path twenty miles due east from the airport where it was due to land. For the first five miles of its descent, the noise from the jet’s engines disturbed no-one. At the sixth mile, an ornithologist, birdwatching on a reservoir, was irritated by the jet-noise just enough to give the aircraft a quick glance. He turned into a swan. At the seventh mile a naturalist and his wife saw the aircraft through net-curtains and were turned into crows. At the eighth mile, four children in a school dormitory saw the aircraft through a skylight and turned into herons. At the ninth mile, seven night-nurses in an old people’s home saw the plane and turned into swallows. At the tenth mile, twenty-one members of eight families saw the plane and turned into gulls. By the ninteenth mile, twenty-four thousand, nine hundred and twenty-seven people in two towns, four villages and a camping-site had seen the plane. Most of them had turned into penguins. When the plane exploded on the air-strip, a cassowary with a purple beak stepped from the wreckage and checked himself into the VIP lounge. |
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“Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.” What is the role of photography in the space of projected fantasy? A frame of reference for a thing that may or may not have ever existed, a surface that doubles as both well and black hole. The photograph becomes a location of meaning, both spatially and temporally. We rely more and more heavily upon the image to provide a picture of reality that we can depend on, all the while that location to which we have grounded ourselves becomes more and more disparate, two-faced, and untrustworthy. If we lose the ability to image ourselves, we must ask, where physically are we left to exist? And how then can we keep track of time? What can we imagine as the place we long to be? Or will we accept the fate of the image and surrender to formless, timeless, endless fluidity, without the comfort of a moment, a site, a point of isolation?
Opening Friday, February 11th 7-10pm |